Engineers at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, have developed a system capable of manipulating automotive radar sensors and making vehicles “hallucinate” in a variety of scenarios. These include hiding the approach of an oncoming vehicle, making it appear as if a real car has suddenly changed direction, or creating a non-existent ghost car.
This system, called MadRadar, performs tasks quickly and does not require prior knowledge of the specific radar configuration of the target vehicle.
“We can make a fake vehicle appear out of thin air or make a real vehicle disappear in real-world experiments,” Miroslav Pajic, Dickinson Family Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and leader of the team behind MadRadar, said in a statement. .
Real world case studies
Radar is crucial for modern vehicles equipped with assisted and autonomous driving technologies to detect nearby moving vehicles. The variety of makes and models on the road means that vehicles have slightly different operating parameters, which traditionally makes radar spoofing difficult.
However, MadRadar overcomes this obstacle by identifying a vehicle's radar parameters in a quarter of a second and then initiating its own radar signals to fool the target radar system.
Described as a “general black-box radar attack framework for automotive mmWave FMCW radars,” MadRadar can estimate the configuration of the victim radar in real-time and then execute an attack based on the estimates.
The research states: “We evaluate the impact of such attacks that maliciously manipulate the victim's radar point cloud and show the novel ability to `add' (i.e. false positive attacks), `remove' (i.e. false attacks negative) or eliminate effectively. “move” (i.e., translation attacks) object detections from the victim vehicle scene. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of our attacks in real-world case studies conducted using a real-time physical prototype on a software-defined radio platform.”
The researchers plan to detail their work at the 2024 Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium, in San Diego, California. The paper is currently available on the arXiv preprint server.
The researchers emphasize that the existence of MadRadar underlines the urgent need for manufacturers to improve the security measures of their radar systems to protect them against possible misuse.
“We are not building these systems to harm anyone, we are demonstrating the existing problems with current radar systems to show that we need to fundamentally change the way we design them,” Pajic concluded.
